A key principal of usability testing is that users should simulate actual usage as much as possible. That means using realistic tasks that represent users' most common goals on the website or app they'll be working with 'out in the wild.' Usability testing is inherently contrived but we still want to provide as realistic a testing environment as possible. For public facing websites this is

There are a lot of misconceptions about when it is and when it is not appropriate to test with five users. There's no reason to take an extreme position on this issue and think it's never acceptable or always the right number. Instead you should understand what you can and cannot learn from just a handful of users in a usability test. Five Reasons You

After I conducted my first usability test in the 1990's I was struck by two things: just how many usability problems are uncovered and how some problems repeat after observing just a few users In almost every usability test I've conducted since then I've continued to see this pattern. Even after running 5 to 10 users in a moderated study, there are usually too many

Failing to plan is planning to fail. It's both good practice and often necessary to have a test plan before beginning a usability test. Like any plan, it should not only lay out the framework of the study, but also help identify problems with the methodology, metrics or tasks while something can still be done to fix things. Test plans, like many documents, can take

Are you sure you did that right? When we put the effort into making a purchase online, finding information or attempting tasks in software, we want to know we're doing things right. Having confidence in our actions and the outcomes is an important part of the user experience. That's why we ask users how confident they are that they completed a task in a usability

You need users in order to do usability testing. It can be a small scale do-it-yourself usability test or a large sample corporate usability test but finding available users can be a burden. It's often cited as one of the reasons usability testing isn't done more often. The process by which you find your users will vary depending on what you are testing, the types

The core idea behind usability testing is having real people trying to accomplish real tasks on software, websites, cell phones or hardware. Identifying what users are trying to do is a key first step. Once you know what tasks you want to test, you'll want to create realistic task scenarios for participants to attempt. A task is made up of the steps a user has

When conducting a usability test, gathering input on a design, or testing new features, we strongly recommend the 1:1 moderated session over group sessions. However, we usually aren't convincing others to run 1:1 sessions. Instead, we spend more effort convincing others of combining the traditional in-person 1:1 session with other methods. We find we can generate more insights at the same or less cost using

When we have a good experience with a service or product, we enjoy it, tell our friends, and will probably use that service or product again. But when we have a frustrating or poor experience, such as the occurrence of message boxes relentlessly popping up during sporting events, we hate the product, tell our friends about our bad experience, post it to Twitter, and we

One of the biggest barriers to conducting usability testing is the cost and time involved in testing. Moderators have to bring users to a dedicated location, test each one (usually one at a time), and only then get results from only a handful of users. Unmoderated usability testing is a technique using software such as our MUIQ tool or Loop11 to administer tasks and questions